


In Absentia

by sddeer



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Destroy Ending, F/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-31
Updated: 2012-12-31
Packaged: 2017-11-23 03:05:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/617386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sddeer/pseuds/sddeer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shepard sends a bleeding and battered Garrus back to the Normandy just before she heads on to the Citadel. Both bereft of family and love, Tali becomes his saving grace just as he is hers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Absentia

“Shepard? Shepar—augh, dammit!” Garrus coughed up more blood than air, dark blue spattering his mandibles and hands as the soldier in the shuttle applied the Medi-Gel to his worst wounds. Tali was— was she holding his hand? He gave it a squeeze. She might have been crying, but his ears registered nothing but the silence over his headset. He couldn’t hear her voice anymore; the intercom in the cockpit crackled out an order for a full retreat for all ground forces. They were counting her out.

Damn fools.

Then it was, ‘Someone’s made it to the Citadel,’ and Garrus knew exactly who it was. Why not say ‘Shepard?’ It couldn’t be anyone else. Why wouldn’t they say her name?

He floated in and out of consciousness, the flurry of soldiers and pilots and static commands from every ship in Earth’s orbit melding into a confusing blur. Someone moved him, carried him, a gruff command to be careful from one Jimmy Vega. Joker’s voice. EDI. Chakwas, too, and Tali never let go of his hand. A huge, red light pierced through his daze followed by shouts that sounded so much like victory that the impending crash seemed unimportant.

Garrus came to only to find that he was curled around Tali like a protective shell. They were on the floor under one of the beds. Equipment from the Med Bay—much of it very sharp—was strewn about the place. One of the internal walls of the ship had collapsed. If it weren’t for his natural armor, he would have been seriously injured, and Tali’s suit would have absolutely been punctured, or worse.

“H-hey,” he croaked, his throat still coated with dust and blood and the taste of death from Earth, and he slowly uncoiled, making sure that the bed wouldn’t fall on her once he moved.

Tali let out a whimper, and he nearly came undone, his composure melting away into panic until she slid her hand across the floor and grabbed at his forearm. “Garrus,” she gasped, “you saved me. I didn’t even know you were conscious.” 

He pulled her out and helped her to her feet, kicking away the debris near them. It wasn’t until he was standing that he saw the top of the bed, which was stained with pools of congealing, blue blood, that he began to feel ill. “Are you all right? Is your suit okay?” Garrus asked, hand on her shoulder, looking her over.

“Yes,” she said before checking, then opened her omni-tool and ran a quick scan. “No major ruptures.” 

“Where’s Shepard?” The words leapt out of his mouth before he could stop them. She turned her head, avoiding his gaze. “Tali?”

“Garrus—”

A cough escaped him, and it sounded curiously like a sob. “Tali, where’s Shepard? Was she on the deck when we crashed? She could be hurt!”

“We don’t know what happened to her. She went to the Citadel, and then… it exploded.”

Garrus stumbled backwards, tripping over a metal beam and grabbing onto an intact part of the counter for support. “What do you mean it exploded?” he demanded when his grip nearly tore an entire chunk out of the metal.

She didn’t get a chance to respond, however, as the door was forced open by Vega to let Kaidan carry Joker in. “EDI?” the pilot yelled. “LT, get me into the AI Core.”

“Joker, you’re injured.” 

“Fuck right off, Kaidan. This is more important. Something’s wrong!”

James dutifully went to the door to the AI Core and pressed the manual override button, using his sheer strength to pry it open. “There ya go. I’m going to try to find Chakwas so she can take a look at your… all of you,” the lieutenant told him. “She wasn’t in the Med Bay when we crashed.”

Joker waved him away. “Garrus, Tali, I need your help. Something’s wrong with EDI. All her systems are offline, like she was hacked and powered down when we were hit by that beam.” The human glanced between the two of them seriously, and as sick as Garrus felt, he felt his legs move him forward to do as he was bidden. Kaidan looked distinctly uncomfortable holding Joker up but didn’t protest any further.

After thirty minutes of fervently trying everything they could think of and a few things that quite frankly Joker was just making up out of desperation, Chakwas was located and opted to inject the pilot with a sedative. He did not cooperate. “We won’t need him to fly the plane any time soon,” she reasoned. “Plus, if he figures out how to repair the damage to EDI, she won’t know if she has been powered down for two days or two years.”

Then the doctor cringed at her choice of words, and Garrus spun around and strode out of the room as quickly as he possibly could. He ignored her calling after him, telling him that he really shouldn’t have been up to begin with, and he had lost a lot of blood, and if Jeff woke up she would need help restraining him, and made his way outside onto the lush planet surface. Tali followed, but he decided to ignore her, too, as long as she kept her distance. She did.

The sun was setting or possibly rising. He stared into it until little black specks began to cloud his vision. When he was on Menae, he would look at the stars and wonder how different they looked from Earth. The nights were clear from the surface of Palaven’s moon and the constellations more prominent; he closed his eyes halfway until the light from them was blurred and unfamiliar and created new constellations, naming them after human things or some of their old missions together. 

That didn’t help him now, though. Nobody knew what planet it was or even which star they orbited. Light filtered through the tropical trees, and it wasn’t the paradise he had imagined his retirement would be after the war. No Shepard. No kids. No ship, even, so he could return to Palaven and see his sister once she got back… once she got back from…

Maybe it was all he’d lost or maybe his unhealed wounds were catching up with him, but it was no longer in his power to remain on his feet. Sinking to the ground, he fell on his knees hard. Footsteps pattered on the ground, running to him, and soon Tali was crouched beside him with her hand on his back, the other resting on his arm.

“The Citad—” he tried to say, his voice breaking.

“Exploded,” she said again. “Anyone who was on it died. Not even Shepard could have survived.”

Since when had Tali become the strong one? Probably when nobody was looking. He raised his eyes slowly. They were all old soldiers now. “That’s where my father was taking my sister. It was supposed to be the safest place in the galaxy.” It came out as a whine more than anything else.

And that was all there was to it. Shepard was his reason to live, but his sister was at the very least his reason to survive. Once, when Tali was on trial and they discovered her father’s body, Shepard had pulled her into a hug as she cried. She wordlessly mimicked the gesture in a muted way, sitting next to him and hugging one of his arms. He focused his attention on the top of the trees. The sun was rising. That didn’t make anything better.

“Garrus, please… don’t leave me alone.” She didn’t say she was sorry. She must have known he didn’t want to hear it.

It was several minutes before he found the words to respond. “You have Rannoch.”

“You have Palaven,” she pointed out immediately. He understood what she was trying to say and nodded.

“Okay. I won’t.”

—

Quite a few years later, when the mass relays had all been returned to peak functionality and the Citadel was repaired, Garrus walked through his front door and let it seal behind him. Following decontamination, he moved into the main room of the house and started to take his boots off.

A smiling face peeked around the corner. “Boots off?” she chirped, her face crinkled in all the right places from the grin she wore.

“I was raised in a military society, I think I can be trained to take my boots off after decontamination.” Garrus set them aside and crossed the room, taking her face in his hands and kissing her gently. As always, she raised one finger to trace his colony tattoos. “How did today’s immuno-therapy go?”

Tali crossed her arms and huffed. “I can’t wait until it’s over. I don’t see why I have to be the one to test it just because you’re in charge of the company that patented the treatment.”

“Because you deserve to be able to see Shepard’s monument at the Citadel without a mask getting in the way, and they’re unveiling it soon. Besides, it’s not like I can do it. My immune system works just fine.” He was teasing her, and she knew it.

“I suppose not. Just so long as I don’t have to name anybody ‘nar Citadel.’ That would be embarrassing.”

He laughed and shook his head. “First quarian child who doesn’t need to be put in a bubble after birth, and your biggest concern is her location name marker? It’s a good thing she won’t be related to me. ‘Edi’Vakarian nar Citadel’ would be the worst name of all.”

She frowned at him. “I already told you, if you wanted to use your surname, I’m sure they’d—”

“No, no. Your DNA, your name. I’m not going to make all the quarians distrust me by trying to break your name assignment system. And don’t bring up naming her after Shepard, either. She seemed pretty insistent that nobody name their kids after her.”

Tali didn’t look convinced but let the matter of names drop. It was something they discussed before deciding on the procedure that would more or less use all of Tali’s DNA to create a new fetus. It was similar to the process Miranda’s father had used, only without the extensive modifications. “You’ve been thinking about Shepard a lot.” It wasn’t an accusation, just an observation. Whenever the Citadel was in the news, Garrus would get quiet.

He shrugged, his hands falling to her growing waist and pulling her close. ”So have you. She changed both our lives.” When she didn’t respond, he knew what she was thinking. “You promised you wouldn’t ask that.”

Her tone was patient, as it always was with him. “I’m not asking.” To her credit, she never had. When she made it clear how she wanted to pursue something more than friendship with him, Garrus agreed under the condition that she could never ask him if he would prefer to be with Shepard. At the time, she thought it was because the answer would always be ‘yes.’ She agreed, but he could tell it had been eating away at her ever since.

Sighing, he cupped her cheek with his hand. He had moved to her homeworld, done everything in his power to help the quarians begin to readjust to living planetside—even going so far as to start the most successful immune system therapy that had ever been researched and put into practice—and it seemed he still hadn’t made his point.

“Well, I’ll tell you, anyway. But I’m only going to say it once, so you had better listen carefully. I loved Shepard, but she’s gone. Not even the Lazarus Project could bring her back a second time, and even if it could, I wouldn’t let that happen.” He paused, gathering his thoughts. “It wouldn’t be fair to what she meant to me if I said I preferred that she died so we could have this. But that doesn’t mean that I’d trade what we do have for anything else. I love you, Tali’Zorah vas Rannoch.” 

She smiled at him gratefully, as though she had been waiting for so long for him to quell her fears. “And you won’t leave me alone?”

He closed his eyes and inclined his head, pressing their foreheads together. A ghost of the last conversation he’d had with Shepard whispered in his ear. “You’ll never be alone,” he repeated.

“Never,” she replied.


End file.
